INTEL CORE I5-10600K
Has AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600X finally met its match?
UNDOUBTEDLY the i5s of this world are the most popular of Intel’s CPUs, the most sought after. These mid-range chips have often provided an astonishingly goodvalue proposition for those not looking to render everything at lightning speed. They have been and still are by far the go-to chip of choice for the gamer. Why’s that? Well it all comes down to impressive single-core performance, balanced perfectly with power draw, thermals, and cost. Get all the gaming prowess of a Core i7 or an i9, but with 50 percent off the latter’s retail price tag.
For the longest time, in Intel’s world of quad-core dominance, the main difference between the Core i5 and the i7 product lines was one simple addition: Hyper-Threading. The logic at the time as far as recommendations were concerned was simple: If you used your machine as part of your work day, and multi-threaded applications were key to that, then the Core i7 was the processor to pick; if you didn’t, and it was solely for gaming, the Core i5 was the best solution. For everything else there was the Core i3. Nothing really changed from its 1st to its 9th-gen architectures. Until now.
Yep, we’ve finally crossed that sacred threshold: Intel’s latest Core i5-10600K comes with Hyper-Threading, giving you access to six cores and 12 threads. In fact, mimicking its AMD rivals, every single processor—bar the very low-end Celeron parts—in Comet Lake features HyperThreading as standard. So whatever the core count, you can effectively double it for better performance in applications that benefit from more threads.
So what does that mean? Well this Core i5-10600K is almost equivalent to the Core i7-8700K launched back at the end of October 2017. In single-core performance it clocks up to 4.8GHz turbo, 200MHz faster than its three-year-old predecessor. It doesn’t stop there either, with a new, wider chip design (thus the new socket) and better solder TIM (thermal interface material) between the die and the integrated heatspreader. The Core i5-10600K is about 10 degrees cooler too, and cheaper at $262 instead of the Core i7-8700K’s $359.
But this isn’t 2017, and the landscape has evolved dramatically. Intel’s biggest competition for this generation of Core i5 is AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600X, and that’s no slouch either. Right off the bat, support for PCIe 4.0 gives AMD the edge—certainly in terms of future-proofing—and its refined architecture and 7nm manufacturing process has helped sharpen up the low single-core IPC figures we saw when Ryzen first launched.
In our testing, things perhaps fell where you might expect: AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600X held the high ground when it came to any multi-threaded task, only losing out in single-core performance. This is in part down to AMD leaning heavily into PBO to keep the turbo speeds up across all of its cores for longer, and in part due to better optimization in multi-threaded applications. Although game-changing at the time, Hyper-Threading just isn’t quite as efficient as AMD’s multi-threading, and it shows here. In areas where we typically see Intel shore-up victories thanks to its impressive single-core performance,
AMD starts clawing back some results, with it being only five percent slower in applications such as FryRender and TechARP’s x264. In games, however, the pure grunt of Intel’s single-core performance and extensive optimization shines through, with a solid six to seven percent performance bump noticeable in both of our testing titles.
We’re also seeing lower temperatures on our Core i5-10600K than the competition, and yet lower power-draw on Ryzen. It’s a whole mixed bag. The two chips are very impressive, and very similar, but there’s one caveat, and that’s the price. Right now AMD’s readjusted its processors to capitalize on Intel’s new launch, and we’re seeing the Ryzen 5 3600X available for just $205, down from the $250 it originally debuted at. It’s not a huge drop, but combine that with the included cooler, and the peace of mind knowing you have PCIe 4.0 compatibility, and it certainly delivers a blow to the i5.
If you’re dead set on Intel and are after a new gaming processor that you can dabble in multi-threaded apps, Intel’s Core i5 still represents good-value. However, the reality is that AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600X is just better for the money, and the better recommendation if you care at all about future-proofing.